Where’s Nico?

For this post’s title, I went with one of the songs from Bob Dylan and the Band’s sessions back in the 60’s. Bob Dylan has written more words than there are. Over the last 15 or 20 years, there’s been a whole side business of finding stuff that Dylan recorded that wasn’t officially released and get it out there – they literally call it “The Bootleg Series” and they’ve put out 17 albums worth of this stuff so far. Anyway, the stuff that Dylan and the Band did – referred to as the “Basement Tapes” sessions, was finally officially released on Bootleg Series Volume 11.

The “Basement Tapes” sessions are pretty legendary – if you want a fun album to check out, listen to “The New Basement Tapes”. It was essentially a one-off supergroup (Elvis Costello, Dawes, Marcus Mumford, Jim James, etc.) that formed about a decade ago to take the magical music from those sessions and make an official release out of them. Several of the songs even reference my beloved Kansas City, including a great song simply called “Kansas City” (not to be confused with the old blues classic). But for this post, I went with a Basement Tapes cut called “Edge of the Ocean”, probably for obvious reasons as we now ask…. “Where’s Nico?”

Willamette National Forest!

Now Willamette isn’t actually on the edge of the ocean, but we just got here on Tuesday of last week, and I haven’t been that great about getting new posts er… posted. We spent the prior two weeks on Tillicum Beach, where we were set up about 100 feet or so from the Pacific. As I mentioned in the last post, Tillicum Beach, in Suislaw National Forest, was one of our favorite spots last year and we had a great time returning there this year.

While in Suislaw, we didn’t do as many forest hikes this year as we had last year, and there are a number of wonderful hikes through beautiful old growth forest in this area. Instead, this year we focused more on enjoying the beach. We often took three or four trips down to the beach to walk along the shore each day, and enjoyed setting up on the the beachfront for picnics or to catch the amazing sunsets. Along the way, we saw a grey whale mama and her calf, saved a ten pound tarpon that had been pulled in by the tide, encountered bunches of jellyfish, explored tide pools full of star fish and sea anemones, dug these cool isopods out of the wet sand – we had a blast!

(Don’t worry! We got him back into the ocean and I’m sure he’s living a very full life out there)

(Yeah… I did not pick up this jellyfish to save him. But I’m guessing that the tide came in right after taking this pic and he’s having a fun happy hour with his jellyfish friends right now as you’re reading this)

(Sadly, I didn’t get a good pic of the whales, but you can see the mama breaching here just a bit up and left of the treetop)

Kristen ordered this lean to for us to utilize on the beach, and it worked out great for us – especially on the days that got a bit windy.

And did I mention we caught some really nice sunsets?

The hike to the beach from our campsite was brief to say the least – we basically walked out our trailer door, and down this flight of 20 or so steps and we were there!

While on the coast, we also got to enjoy the “Lah De Dah” parade for the second consecutive year on Independence Day. The parade is held in a small cape town called Yachats (pronounced “Ya Hot ZZZZZ!”), and it’s quite a hoot, as the kids today would say. Actually, I’m guessing that’s something kids in the 1950’s would have said. Today’s kids – I don’t know what the heck they’d say.

Anyway, this little town puts on a fun parade. Last year, there were probably a hundred or so basset hounds in it. This year, we missed the bassets, but it was still a blast.

(don’t let Nico’s “Resting Nico Face” make you think he didn’t love the whole thing…)

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Anyway – after two great weeks enjoying the ocean at Tillicum, last Tuesday we headed over to Willamette National Forest. If you’re reading this and you said “Will – a – mette” in your head, you are incorrect. It’s actually pronounced “Will – am – ette”. This blew my mind when I learned this last year, as, for a craft beer geek, I had heard people praise “will-am-ette” hops for years and years.

If Willamette sounds familiar to you, I did post about our visit to this area during our adventures last year. This really is a lovely national treasure, and I’d highly recommend you come visit it if you ever have the opportunity. The beautiful Mackenzie River runs through it, and the old growth forests are fantastic.

We were able to score the same boondocking location in Willamette as we got last year, which is really a wonderful spot.

We have been seeing some hummingbirds out here, but they’re a bit different from the ones we encountered in New Mexico and Arizona. This breed of hummingbirds, the Rufous Hummingbird, are orange with some green on their backs. They seem a bit more skittish about humans than the ones we encountered earlier in the trip. I didn’t take this pic – I stole it from the Googles – but this is what they look like:

We’ll be hanging out here until early next week, when we’ll head on to our next destination. _____________________________________________________________________________________

ANA (Ask Nico Anything!)

With all your travels, do you have a favorite place?

Dis guud kwestin. Nico like to be with mama and papa. Pretty much anywere with dem is favorite for Nico. Sumtime mama and papa walk a long way jus to end up where they started earlier in day. This not always Nico favorite, but it okay if they bring snack.

In your last post, you mentioned your business idea that you called “Bacon For Dogs”, where you would give free bacon away to dogs. If you give it away for free, how do you see this business working out?

Bacon is the bes. Evrywon luv bacon. It expesiv to giv bacon for free, but we make up for it with volyume. If we give away lot of bacon, it work out, I pretty sure. If you would like to be “angel invster” in biznes, let Nico no.

Do you enjoy answering questions on your blog?

Well, Nico undersand he need to be responseev to his adorreen fans. But Nico does find it hard to type ansers on keybord with his paws. The compooters are not made with dog paw in mind I theenk. It make this tuff.

– Ken, 7/16/2025